debate: baldwin vs. buckley

“Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”

This was the question on February 18, 1965, when an overflow crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin — the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement — and William F. Buckley Jr., America’s most prominent conservative intellectual.

The stage was set for an extraordinary confrontation: Baldwin’s call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley’s defense of the American establishment. Their exchange laid bare the deep divisions at the heart of American democracy — divisions whose echoes continue to shape our present.

In restaging this debate, the american vicarious seeks to return Baldwin and Buckley’s words to public conversation through the voices of contemporary artists. Sixty years later, the arguments remain piercing, the stakes undiminished, the questions still demanding our attention.

Artist Statement

We began working on Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley in the summer of 2020, a moment marked by global upheaval, racial reckoning, and deepening polarization. Against that backdrop, the words spoken in 1965 at the Cambridge Union — James Baldwin’s piercing indictment of racial injustice and William F. Buckley Jr.’s defense of the American establishment — felt uncannily present.

Our decision to restage the debate was not about inhabiting monumental figures. Baldwin and Buckley’s voices are too singular to impersonate. Instead, our aim has been to return their words — still searing, still unresolved — to public conversation through the voices of contemporary artists.

What makes this debate endure is not only the substance of the ideas but the form of the exchange itself. Two deeply opposed thinkers confronted one another with passion and conviction, but also within the discipline of civility, reason, and public discourse. At a time when dialogue is so often drowned out by division, we believe there is value in experiencing that form again — not as nostalgia, but as provocation.

Debate is both theatrical and civic. It is an invitation to listen across divides, to reckon with the unfinished questions Baldwin and Buckley posed, and to ask what kind of public discourse we want to carry forward today.

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